The Cleanup

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

"How's Mona doing?"

  "She's . . . sleeping." He couldn't elaborate. He couldn't bring up Lisa. It was

  (TOO CLOSE)

  too close for comfort.

  Julie looked like she wanted to pursue it, but somebody hollered for her at the other end of the bar. She shot him a look that was half reproach, half compassion, then followed the call of the wild.

  Billy watched her move off, feeling the like and lust and love careen through his heart and mind. It didn't help when Jessie caught sight of him, smiled and waved delightfully.

  They were good people. He loved them.

  They were unspeakably, terrifyingly fragile.

  He endangered them.

  He was under fire.

  And they were in the way.

  Billy drained his beer quickly, and without another word. He peeled a five-spot from under the dwindling wad in his pocket and slipped it under his glass. He and Bubba were gone before Julie made it back.

  There was something very important that he had to do. They were all on the firing line, and he had to get them off. One way or the other.

  Right now.

  Mona was still sleeping, albeit fitfully, when they returned. Billy was pleased: he didn't want her to be alone when she woke up. He also didn't want her to be awake right now, so this was probably the best of all possible worlds.

  Yahoo.

  It didn't take long to write the letters: he'd had all the way home to think about how to say what had to be said. They were short, they were eloquent (if he did say so himself), and they acted upon his soul like Novocain on a rotted tooth. By the time he was done, he half believed them himself.

  Bubba sat beside him the whole time. Bubba didn't know much, but some things he knew very clearly. He knew Love. He knew Friend.

  He knew Good-bye.

  Billy stood and tucked one letter in his jacket pocket; the other he placed where Mona would be certain to find it.

  Bubba whimpered, and the sound of it tugged strings in Billy's heart that he'd hoped would be too numb. He knelt down and skritched Bubba's head.

  "You're a good boy," Billy said, choking back the tears. "And I love you very very much."

  Bubba whined. He knew that.

  "And you're not nearly as stupid as you look."

  Bubba knew that.

  Billy faltered slightly, skritching Bubba's head all the harder for it. "And now you're gonna have to be extra strong, and extra smart, 'cause you've got to watch for her."

  Bubba snapped-to at the Word. Billy smiled through the relentless push of tears. "'Cause it's time, Bubba," he whispered.

  "It's time for me to go."

  Bubba knew that, too.

  FORTY-THREE

  BODY SHOP

  Stanley sat slumped in his favorite chair, fevered and delirious. The TV blasted before him, refusing to stay on any one channel for more than ten seconds, grafting commercial to program to news broadcast in a lunatic montage of light and sound. He would've liked to watch something in particular, but the tuner wouldn't stay put.

  They wouldn't let it.

  It was their way of punishing him, of getting back at him for everything that had gone wrong. For the girl. For his arm. For disobeying them.

  For more than he knew.

  Stanley threw a halfhearted, bloodshot glance at his decimated right arm. He didn't really want to see. It hurt to even turn his head.

  But seeing it, in all its bloated glory, gave Stanley Peckard a newfound sense of perspective.

  It was really starting to swell now, encased in the moist material of his trench coat like an enormous slate-gray kielbasa. The elbow was utterly destroyed: ligaments shredded, bones jutting from bruised flesh.

  The shoulder wasn't much better. Lisa had quite thoroughly dislocated it, and the pain had spread across his torso like hot bands of molten slag, reducing every breath and movement to just one more cause for agony.

  If it were up to him, he would have died on the spot.

  But, no . . .

  They hadn't let him. They'd made him rise, shrieking and flailing, to stumble off into the night.

  They'd made him come home. Unlock the door. Fall inside.

  And, once inside . . .

  . . . they'd made him do Other Things: things he couldn't have done alone.

  Except that he wasn't alone.

  They had been with him. They had lined him up and aimed him. They had made him slam! and slam! and slam! into the wall until his mangled shoulder had fallen back into place.

  But that wasn't enough. There had still been all the blood.

  So they had dragged him bodily into the shower. And forced him to hose himself down.

  And then, when the blood had mostly rinsed away, they'd allowed him to stumble and fall and crawl back to his favorite chair.

  And even now—in his shivering cold and torment, some twelve hours later—they punished him. Spinning the channels too fast, with the volume too loud, they punished him. With jeering, yattering cries that clawed through his brain, they punished him.

  Through it all, they punished him.

  Leaving Stanley in his chair, drifting in and out of consciousness, staring at the horror that his left arm had become. The hand was a vicious, angry red: swollen to nearly twice its normal size, the blood in it trapped by the constriction of his sleeve. With great difficulty, he brought his right hand around to touch it.

  Leaving marks that wouldn't, couldn't ever fade. Stanley just giggled.

  The Voices were absolutely furious. The wanted him up! and out! and away!

  Stanley wouldn't obey.

  The Voices and the Little Ones went truly mad then, shrieking through his skull and rattling the silverware and flipping the channel changer so hard that it snapped off and flew across the room.

  Stanley didn't care.

  He didn't care if they broke the TV He didn't care when the pain went

  (!!!!!)

  and

  (!!!!!)

  until he could no longer see straight. They had made him do it, made him kill his only friend. And he would never forgive them for that. So long as he lived.

  It didn't promise to be much longer.

  Stanley Peckard sat in his comfy chair and giggled. The pain in his arm was so excruciatingly unrelenting that anything they threw at him seemed to pale in comparison.

  It gave him perspective. It robbed them of their only method of enforcement. They had no leverage. They held no sway.

  The pain set Stanley free; and in so doing, it left him free to do what he pleased.

  He blacked out.

  While the demons raged on, and on, and on.

  FORTY-FOUR

  THE BEST-LAID PLANS

  Larry was in absolutely no hurry to get home. It was the most unpleasant option in his entire universe of possibility, with the possible exception of getting torn apart by rabid weasels. But there were some things that he absolutely had to do there. None of them pleasant. All of them essential.

  So it was nearly six-thirty when he finally dragged his ass back down to good old Stanton Street. It was already getting dark, fattening the shadows, giving them the strength to conquer the night. Larry's anxieties reacted much the same, gaining weight if not substance as he nervously moved down the street.

  The brooding blackness of the construction site unnerved him. He kept waiting for something to jump out of it. The couple of Hispanics hanging out on the sidewalk didn't do much for him, either; it was getting hard to trust in the indifference, much less the good will, of strangers.

  But no attacks came from either direction. Which left him only with the one terror that he knew lay before him.

  The one indicated by the lights shining out from Billy's bedroom window.

  There was a long, jittering moment in which he considered turning back. All of his instincts screamed for him to do so; his body language spoke clearly and fluently. His intuition, so often silent, informed him in no uncertain terms that Billy was dangerous, Billy was
insane, Billy wasn't really Billy anymore.

  And if you go up there, it continued, you'll be alone with him.

  Alone.

  But there was one mitigating factor, and it was a big one: he had nowhere else to go. Everything he owned—what remained of it, anyway—was up there, as well as the only roof he had to put it under. Foxy Brenda, God bless her empty head, was not yet ready to take him under her wing; nor was he entirely ready to let her, even as a mercenary interim gesture.

  No. The place was his, just as much as Billy's, and maybe even more so. He wasn't the one who'd fallen three months behind! He wasn't the one whose negligence had gotten the place trashed! If anything, he was the only reason that they still had an apartment in the first place!

  Among Larry's assets, his ability to produce logical-sounding bullshit at a moment's notice was certainly his finest. He used that sterling talent now on his toughest audience.

  Himself.

  As he neared the doorway. And the key came out of his pocket.

  And he sealed, once and forever, his fate.

  There was a tiny bonfire burning in the middle of Billy's bedroom floor. It cast a warm glow on the four walls, smelled sweetly of cedar and pine.

  Billy sat, cross-legged, in front of the fire. The last of his tears had already been shed.

  Like the last of his recorded history.

  The first thing to go had been The Real War, his paean to painful naiveté and hopeless, worthless idealism. He'd given it five minutes of spin time when he got home, coddling his maudlin sorrow at having had to say good-bye.

  Three minutes into it, he'd begun to get pissed.

  Five minutes in, he couldn't listen anymore.

  He was laughing too hard.

  The turning point had come.

  The rest of his works had been dispatched to the flames in short order: all his tapes, all his volumes of lyrics and chord charts. Next had gone the regalia: the posters, the concert photos, the handful of news clips from local Pennsylvania papers.

  Last had been the incidentals: report cards, yearbooks, ticket stubs from favorite concerts, love letters, memos, and doodles.

  Photographs from days gone by.

  Plastic and paper didn't smell so hot; he'd changed the scent to suit his tastes. There was no smoke. The floor was unscathed. The fire was completely under control.

  He used it, now, to warm his cold, cold hands.

  And it was wonderful to be so free: unconstrained by mortal bounds, held back by neither love nor death. If they could only get to him through the people he cared for, they could no longer get to him at all. He could not be hurt, and he could not be killed, and his idiot past could not be held against him.

  And what an idiot past it was, he mused, grinning harshly at the cinders of his previous life. He'd have thought it would be painful, coming to grips with the fact that he'd been an asshole since the day he was born. It wasn't.

  It was, in fact, a major relief.

  "Because I'm not you anymore," he said out loud, addressing the ashes. "I'm not the little loser with the big dreams that could never come true. If I want a dream to come true, I just snap my fucking fingers."

  Which said nothing about the little dreamy dreams that he'd held for so long to be true: cosmic visions that sounded reasonable as hell, so long as you completely bypassed reality.

  End sexism? That's easy! a little voice within him said. Just change every man on the planet. End world hunger? No problem! Just go make the world a sandwich. End war? Piece of cake! Just get everybody to drop all of their differences.

  Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. People didn't change that easy.

  Unless you made them.

  Unless you were destined to rule the world.

  And that was the great thing; the difference between the old namby-pamby Billy Rowe and the man who he was rapidly becoming. The old Billy Rowe wished that things were different. The new Billy Rowe made sure that they were. The world was going to go through more changes than it had since the discovery of fire, before he was through.

  All he needed was a little time. Five years, for example. He'd often heard that every budding enterprise required a five-year plan. Now he could see the sense of it. If nothing else, his little I Love New York fiasco had demonstrated that he couldn't just go out and do everything at once.

  Step by step: that was the ticket. Slowly. Surely. Step by step.

  The first thing to do was disappear: spirit a couple million from the coffers of Bechtel or Billy Graham, find a nice little place somewhere, and hole up incognito. Study up on world history and world events. Develop a strategy. Pinpoint his targets.

  And, all the while, develop the Power.

  In the week since he'd become aware of it, the Power had easily tripled. In five years, God only knew how strong he would be. Christ, by the time he hit thirty-three, he would . . .

  He paused. Backed up. Took a look at that number.

  In five years, he would be thirty-three years old.

  Just like the last long-haired son of God who'd come to change the world.

  Billy laughed. He was stunned. It was too perfect to be anything but true. You have been chosen, Christopher had said. A particular man, with a particular purpose: the purpose for which you were born.

  "Christopher!" he called out impulsively, still fighting with the laughter. No response. "Christopher!" he yelled again, dragging his gaze across the naked walls. Firelight and shadow danced across their surfaces, but the angel was nowhere to be seen.

  "C'mon! I need to talk with you!" Still nothing. He remembered the last thing that the angel had said to him; it made him simultaneously embarrassed and exasperated. "C'mon! Don't be a jerk! I apologize! I've seen the light! Now wouldja just—"

  And that was when the front door opened.

  The kitchen was just as it had been when he left it. Larry wondered why he wasn't surprised. His skillful bullshit machinery was in overdrive now, manufacturing verbal courage at a truly staggering rate. He felt ready for Billy to step through the door. He felt ready to hand down the bottom line.

  When Billy stepped through the door, it became just so much windy effluvium. The voice of his instincts came back, saying GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT so loud that he almost just turned and left.

  And then Billy said, "Larry."

  And Larry stopped.

  And the two of them just stared at each other for what seemed very much like forever.

  "Billy," Larry said, at long last and very softly. He was amazed that he had any voice at all. "I'm your friend, am I right?"

  Billy smiled. "I don't know. Are you?"

  "I always thought I was."

  "I always thought you were, too."

  "So what's the problem?"

  "I don't know. You tell me. Tell me if I'm your friend.

  Tell me what is the problem."

  "Well, that's very neat, man," Larry said, continuing to amaze himself, finding it easier as he went along. "Lay it all on me. As if I created the problem myself." His voice was coming back. He used it. "It seems to me like we're caught in the middle of some really weird shit . . ."

  Billy laughed.

  ". . . and we're letting it turn us against each other," Larry continued. "It doesn't seem right. That's all I'm trying to say. We ought to be helping each other, and instead we're—"

  "Larry"

  Pause. The air seemed suddenly colder. "What?"

  "Cut the bullshit, Larry."

  Yes, definitely colder. The fear, coming back. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that it all sounds great, except that you haven't given a shit about me in months. Don't try and deny it. I've been nothing but an inconvenience: a pain in the ass, until someone like Mona throws a party that you, could make some contacts from if you were any fucking good as a comedian. Which you aren't. Know what I mean? Then I'm okay, I get you places. But it doesn't do you any fucking good."

  "Whoa." Larry knew that getting furious was called for at t
his point. He couldn't do it. He didn't have it in him. The room was getting colder, and he was too goddam scared.

  "You want me out of here," Billy pressed on. "I don't have to read your mind. It's all over your face.

  "Well, that's okay. It's really time for me to go. Besides, you've earned this place. It fits you like a glove." He gestured around at the battered and ratty decor. "You deserve each other.

  "But I want you to think about your life, baby, 'cause it's not all that goddam great. You bullshit your way through it. You'll say anything that works. I used to be your friend, but I'm sick of you, because you don't give a shit about anybody but yourself. You lie for a living. You lie to me. You he to yourself. You lie to your lame-brained receptionist, and that's the only reason on Earth why you ever get laid. If disemboweling your grandmother would get you a promotion, you'd strap her down yourself."

  "Billy." It was getting to be too much. The fear was mounting, but it was turning into something that made him want to fight—no, need to fight—with every ounce of strength at his disposal.

  "Billy." Mocking the sound of his own name, as it had come from Larry's mouth. Mimicking it perfectly. "Billy, what?"

  It took a second to work up the courage. Larry continued to be amazed that he had it at all.

  "Billy, shut the fuck up."

  There was a long moment of crackling silence, in which even the air seemed to have frozen in place. Then he felt the first surge of heat against his skin: not painful yet, but mounting by the second. I'm going to die, his mind informed him, distant and obscenely casual. His body, less detached, began to form a scream.

  The doorbell rang.

  Larry's eyes were clamped shut, the thin flesh of his lids feeling the first tingling pain of an imminent massive sunburn. His mind, with that same hideous calm, was now beginning to show travelogues from his past. His nostrils smelled heat, and his ears heard nothing. He was no longer aware of Billy at all.

  But he felt the heat move away from him suddenly, felt the tangible wave of concentrated light shift suddenly to his left and away. The sudden cool air around his superheated skin was as shocking as the leap from a sauna to a snowbank. His eyes flew open.